A Relationship Breakdown
Hogs, people, and what we've been asked to normalize. Concluding Chapter 1 of Medical Apartheid.
In December of 2001, the true story of a young farmer on a large swine farm was highlighted in a publication of Christian Century.
The young man had been raised with these kinds of pigs, and he was able to detect symptoms of disease among a number of them on the farm where he was employed. He knew exactly how to treat these animals and bring them back to health.
However, this farm was a business that had already decided the profit margin of healing pigs was too low, so if a pig got sick, the company policy was to deliver a severe strike to the sick pig’s head and kill it.
The young farmer decided that he would simply come in, on his own time and with his own medicine, and cure all the animals. He was successful, and the pigs recovered.
He was fired immediately.
Fittingly, I first read this story when I was tucked away in Costa Rica, the only country in Latin America to reverse deforestation, in an essay collection titled The World Ending Fire by Wendell Berry.
Berry is a farmer. He’s also probably some kind of American prophet, famously penciling out warnings to the nation to count the natural and social cost of unchecked economic and corporate development. He relays that story of the fired farmer in his essay Two Minds, writing:
“There is a remarkable difference between a hog factory, which exists only for the sake of an economic product, and a good farm, which exists for many reasons, including the pleasure of the farm family, their affection for their home, their satisfaction in their good work- in short, their patriotism. Such a farm yields its economic product as a sort of side effect of the health of a flourishing place in which things live according to their nature. The hog factory attempts to be totally rational, which is to say a totally economic, enterprise. It strips away from animal life and human work every purpose, every benefit too, that is not economic.”
Harriet Washington recounts a travel memoir entry in the first chapter of her book Medical Apartheid by a 19th-century Mormon physician who has just visited a D.C. Slave market. Dr. Frederick Gardiner is witnessing the very lucrative work that doctors were hired for in motion: Enslaved Soundness checks. He is impressed by the care that is shown for the health of these people and imagines that the Southerners must coddle and care for their precious enslaved people with intensity, as they are extremely valuable. Healthy enslaved people he imagines, are a priority to the South.
For his somewhat lengthy account, the only two things Dr. Gardiner got right in his entire assessment of the culture were that Enslavement could not have existed without medical science and that the purchased enslaved people were extremely valuable. If he had been correct, perhaps generations of cultural memory would include a sense of trust between African American communities and the medical establishment, but right from the start the doctor’s most significant relationship was the one between physician and enslaver, not physician and patient.
Doctors determined for enslaving companies which people were to be killed on the spot if they could not survive the heinous conditions of the enslaved ship to America.
Doctors determined whether an elderly person who had spent their entire life time giving free labor on a plantation was worth saving or being sold off to be medically experimented on or left to die in a hut.
Doctors colluded with the enslavers to punish the enslaved for wanting rest while sick, prescribing “treatments of hickory” which were just beatings, torture, and whipping, to force the enslaved to work anyways and teach others not to ask for rest for “lesser” illnesses.
Doctors decided who was “good enough” to be sold into slavery.
The death and health of enslaved people were calculated in terms of economic cost and benefit, not in the inherent social right of a human being to be well. The client was not the patient, the client was the enslaver.
While there are slave narratives of the occasional sympathetic doctor who help enslaved people avoid work or buy them time to recover, this was not widespread enough to bring down the multi-billion dollar economic enterprise that devoured the bodies of African Americans. Washington notes that most physicians shared the same economic and political as their clients, and profited immensely off of enslavement.
This was a setup for the medical experimentation to come that allowed doctors to cheaply test and experiment on real, live humans and then sell the cures to White citizens. The fees doctors charged for “soundness” checks of enslaved people before and after sales were exorbitant, but always in high demand, as there was so much money to be made on plantations and farms.
Berry and Washington are speaking of things that happened in the past, but warning of mindsets that exist in the present. What becomes normalized in a culture that uncritically prioritizes profit above all else? Where do care and attention go in a society that views people as units of labor? At what point is the cost of “efficiency’ too high? And who is being asked to bear that cost with their body?
As new child labor laws undermine the protections of children across our nation and economic enslavement and predatory practices towards immigrants and the “lower” classes continue to be unchallenged, we continue to headlong down a very American tradition that erodes our shared humanity, connection, and well being. As we close out Chapter 1, Southern Discomfort, of Medical Apartheid, we will begin to head into the territory of unethical experimentation on human beings. The questions raised then are still pertinent today. While we may not be staring down the eyes of enslavers, we have massive corporations and entities that ask everything of ordinary people while giving them next to nothing to live on. Washington invites us to continue to stay aware of the forefathers of economic injustice and what we all have been forced to inherit.